This application claims the priority of Korean Patent Application Nos. 2003-57727, filed on Aug. 20, 2003 and 2004-62604, filed on Aug. 9, 2004, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for constructing an artificial mark for autonomous driving of an intelligent system, an apparatus and method for determining the position of an intelligent system using the artificial mark, and an intelligent system employing the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
As intelligent systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned vehicle systems, mobile robots, intelligent transportation systems have been attracting increasingly more attentions recently, research and development activities for the systems are briskly performed. In particular, a variety of methods have been suggested for localization method by which an intelligent system recognizes its location. For localization, global positioning systems are used outdoors, while tools such as guided rails, active landmarks, passive landmarks, and natural landmarks are usually used indoors. Among the indoor localization tools, maintenance and management of guided rails, active landmarks, and natural landmarks are difficult and less practical and therefore the passive landmarks are widely used.
Regarding the passive landmarks, a variety of shapes have been suggested. As the most representative case among them, there is a method by which a quadrangle plane with a predetermined size is divided into a predetermined number of smaller quadrangles, then the smaller quadrangles are binarized, and according to the binary codes of a mark, place information or direction information is indicated. However, if this passive marks are used, it takes much time for an intelligent system to pick up an image and detect a next mark, and because of colorless shapes, distinctive power is degraded. In addition, a camera installed in the intelligent system can provide inaccurate location information depending on the location at which the camera finds a mark such that there are restrictions in using the marks.